How to setup DRI with radeonhd

Please note that there is only very experimental 3D support for r6xx based cards so far! There is also a 3D bringup tool available that is already capable of rendering textured triangles. Additionally, there is also EXA and Xv acceleration in master. Both the demo program, the EXA/Xv support, and the experimental 3D driver require a drm built from the r6xx-r7xx branch of mesa/drm (or, for Linux, drm-next is preferable) in order to operate.

The RS6xx IGP parts have a 2D engine and a 3D engine from the R4xx family so do not require "R6xx support".

The rest of this page relates only to R5xx or RS690 for now.

So in order to enable DRI on your r5xx card or 690-based motherboard you need

googleearth doesn't render anything. Apparently it falls back into a slow path (antialiased lines), but that is probably only part of the story.

Building

It's a smart idea to pull all this source down into it's own self contained area, in case you need to blow it all away cleanly and redo the git clone, builds, etc. So in this case we'll use /var/tmp/radeonhd-dri as the main area. Don't use /tmp, this is cleared on reboot on some distributions.

SRC="/var/tmp/radeonhd-dri"
mkdir $SRC
cd $SRC

Please note that the following information is quite Linux-centric at the moment.

Sources

If you want to test the bleeding edge for the main components, we suggest using the git heads, because there are probably still bugs lurking somewhere.

Apparently you need to fetch and build the Xserver only on x86_64, and only if you don't have 1.5.0 or higher - don't update if not necessary, this is painful!

Preconditions

You will stumble upon some preconditions, the following should help here (using released versions whenever possible). You can unpack the released versions with tar xvfj. If they don't work, try the according git tree, you can find the path to the git repository on the gitweb page.

Also, after building the Xserver you have to build and install all input drivers you are using as well. Apparently, you need the very latest bits for them to be compilable, and they have to be compiled against the new ABI of the Xserver. At least this includes:

Also, for the DRM kernel modules you need the kernel sources of your running kernel installed in /usr/src - all major distributions do this correctly nowadays if kernel sources are installed from your distribution.

You may also run into a problem where your libpciaccess it out of date and you need to pull down the latest from git:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/lib/libpciaccess
and build it with the usual manner. This seems to show up on x86_64 builds when the xf86-video-radeonhd build croaks.

Installation

The drm package contains two subsystems, which have to be built and installed separately at the beginning. There's no reason to actually build all the other vendor drm modules, so we'll just build the one we're interested in. In order to make sure that the correct module is loaded check that extra is part of the search list in /etc/depmod.conf - in Ubuntu this typically isn't.

If using a released package (a .tar.bz2), there is no autogen.sh. In that case (and only in that case) you have to call ./configure with the same arguments. Depending on your distro, you might want to add --libdir /usr/lib64 to ./autogen.sh.

The subsystems have to be built and installed in the following order:

dri2proto

mesa (add --with-dri-drivers=radeon,r300,swrast to ./autogen.sh to speed up the build considerably)

Xserver: only if there is need to build the xserver, which is quite painful:

xextproto

xproto (is named x11proto in the git repository)

inputproto

pixman

xserver

xf86-input-mouse

xf86-input-keyboard

xf86-input-evdev (if used)

radeonhd

Notes for Experienced Users

If you have a little experience with building and installing foreign packages, you might want to use a different --prefix in order to not override your installed configuration. In that case you will have to additionally set

with $PREFIX being the directory to be installed to and $LIB being "lib" on i386 and "lib64" on x86_64 (might be distribution dependent).

You can also use build dirs for all subsystems (except for the kernel module and the Mesa subsystem, which uses autoconf, but not automake) by creating a build directory, changing into that directory and calling ../autogen.sh [args]. This has the advantage that the source directory remains untouched. Again, this doesn't work for Mesa and the drm kernel module.

Configuration

DRI is inactive by default.

In order to activate DRI, you have to add

Option "DRI"

to the driver section of your xorg.conf.

Troubleshooting, Q & A

Only the first invocation of a OpenGL program works as expected

You're probably running an older Xserver (< 1.4.99.x) on an x86_64 machine. This is known to exhibit this bug.